the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

jeffdav — Thu, 06 May 2004 21:11:00 GMT

As a footnote, I would like to point to some (in my opinion) interesting documents I found while contemplating the nature of the Web.

http://www.zeltser.com/WWW/
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Overview.html
http://www.w3.org/Summary.html
http://xanadu.com.au/xanadu/faq.html

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Jerry Pisk — Thu, 06 May 2004 21:23:00 GMT

If you instruct the browser not to store a copy of your document in the cache (as in Cache-Control: no-store) IE will not give you the option to view source. Neither it will on an SSL page if you disable saving encrypted pages to disk (which should be the default). However other browsers, ones that actualy do allow you to see the markup (IE doesn't have that feature, all it does is launch notepad/word/whatever with a cached copy of the document, but it doesn't display the source itself), do not have these problems and do allow you to see the markup no matter what you do. Also debuggers (both Microsoft's script debugger and Mozilla's script debugger) will always allow determined people to see both the markup and all the scripts in your page.

It would be nice though for someone to actually summarize why it's not a good idea to disable right clicks, not just few vague paragraphs about how it's not going to stop someone from seeing your markup/scripts/styles.

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

jeffdav — Thu, 06 May 2004 21:29:00 GMT

There is nothing inherently wrong with disabling right-click; it just often the wrong question to be asking. From a UI perspective I am often annoyed when right-click does not do anything-- in Web pages and applications.

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Mike Dimmick — Thu, 06 May 2004 22:28:00 GMT

There's always the MikeBrowser:

C:\> telnet blogs.msdn.com 80
<press Ctrl+]>
Microsoft Telnet> set localecho
Microsoft Telnet> <press Enter>
GET /jeffdav/archive/2004/05/06/127443.aspx HTTP/1.1
Host: blogs.msdn.com

<server spews response>

Of course, disabling caching massively increases the load on your server...

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Jerry Pisk — Thu, 06 May 2004 22:28:00 GMT

I have yet to hear a valid reason why would you want to disable right click on a web page. There are valid reasons to provide your own context menu on some elements of the page but not to disable the default and not to provide any.

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

jeffdav — Thu, 06 May 2004 22:43:00 GMT

I agree. If I have installed browser extentions which are accessed through rclick, such as translator thingies, or the zoom stuff Tony [ http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2004/05/05/126305.aspx ] mentions, I cannot use those on sites that disable rclick.

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Scott Mitchell — Fri, 07 May 2004 01:03:00 GMT

Disabling right-clicking is a Bad Idea IMO because it breaks the concept of a Web page from a usability standpoint. It would be like creating a Windows desktop application without a Menu, or without having F1 launch the help.

I noticed one site basically didn't want people to save the images (it was a place where you could buy the images from your wedding), so they used a bit of client-side JavaScript so whenever you moved the mouse over the image it changed the image to something that said, "MOVE YOUR MOUSE OFF THE IMAGE TO VIEW THIS IMAGE." To me, it seems like a watermark in the preview image would be sufficient...

The point is, if the bits are getting sent to your browser, I don't see how someone could not somehow get the data. The only mechanism I could think of that would prevent someone from saving the bits at all would be to use a Java applet or something that would accept an encoded stream of bits and decode it and display.

If you need to protect your IP THAT MUCH, perhaps a Web site isn't the ideal medium to use to deliver your content...

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

jeffdav — Fri, 07 May 2004 01:58:00 GMT

Scott - I agree.

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Shannon McCracken — Fri, 07 May 2004 06:05:00 GMT

I'm remided of a situation where a person was describing the effort they went to to stop people stealing their images. They broke the image apart into dozens of gifs and used a table to correctly reassemble them, making it difficult for anyone that had the gifs to reassemble them back to the image but it would still look fine to a web browser. (There are tools that "cut" images into pieces, but reassembly ones are not so common.)

The look on his face when I mentioned the "print screen" key was priceless.

The wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Neil's Smaller World — Fri, 07 May 2004 11:28:00 GMT

The wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sat, 08 May 2004 05:44:00 GMT

write in the address field of your IE:
view-source:http://www.microsoft.com/ and you get it :)

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

Peter Torr — Tue, 11 May 2004 02:34:00 GMT

Lowest tech / cheapest "hide the source" trick:

Have 50 newlines at the start of your HTML. Users go View -> Source and see a blank page in Notepad.

They of course don't notice the scrollbar leading to the hidden treasures below...

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

jeffdav — Tue, 11 May 2004 02:36:00 GMT

Or you can put a lot of nonsense at the top that looks like code inside a comment block.

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

JoshS — Tue, 11 May 2004 20:00:00 GMT

There is also Packer:

http://dean.edwards.name/packer/

It obfuscates JS code with the purpose of saving on the file size, and the side effect of making it completely unreadable.

But yes, messing with expected browser functionality is pretty much always a bad idea.

re: the wrongness of "the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?""

just plain wrong — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 10:02:00 GMT

share code and be happy

re: the wrongness of "how do i disable right-click on my web site?"

ç”µå½±å…è´ — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 06:29:00 GMT

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